Monday, April 4, 2016

Tailing Dams Get Bigger, and More Dangerous

Half an hour’s drive from this colonial town in southeast Brazil,
trees suddenly give way to what looks like a desert salt flat. It is a
2-mile-wide valley filled with mine waste.
On Nov.
5, an earthen dam holding back this sea of sludge collapsed, releasing a
deluge that killed 19 people, destroyed villages and traveled more than
400 miles to the Atlantic Ocean, where it left a reddish-brown plume
visible from space. As tall as a 30-story building and holding enough
refuse to fill 19 Dallas Cowboys stadiums, the dam was the largest
structure of its kind ever to give way.
It won’t be the last. From Chile to Australia to the U.S., the quest for economies of scale has prompted mining companies to dig larger and deeper pits,
creating record volumes of waste. To house all that detritus they have
constructed some of the most colossal man-made structures on the planet.
Known as tailings dams, these earthen embankments hold back sprawling
reservoirs of mud, finely ground rock and water—what is left after a
mill separates metals from ore.
In theory, tailings dams are intended to last forever. In
practice, they fail often enough that industry engineers themselves are
sounding alarms. Fifteen months before the Brazilian disaster, Canada
suffered its biggest tailings-dam failure at a copper mine that was in
full compliance with local regulations. Experts estimate that between
one and four breaches occur each year at tailings dams world-wide,
roughly 10 times the failure rate of water dams.
The
largest tailings dams, at copper mines high in the Peruvian Andes, are
already as tall as the Hoover Dam and have permits to rise even further.
“Our dams and dumps are among the highest-risk structures on Earth,”
says
Andrew Robertson,
a Vancouver-based consultant who has designed a number of very
large tailings dams for mining companies. He notes that the biggest
mines increase their waste output by 10 times every third of a century.

Remember, we've had two major fly ash spills, and one sizable mine waste water spill in the past 8 years here in the United States. And the mine waste spill was mainly news because EPA caused it while trying to manage the abandoned mine's waste water. Mining and power generation waste is a massive threat, and weakening oversight and regulation increases the risk of future failures. More extreme weather in the future is going to make the risk of failure that much greater.